Like her literary hero Joan Didion, Greta Gerwig hails from Sacramento, California, and has always worn her West Coast idiosyncrasy as part of her distinct charm as a performer. Emerging from the “mumblecore” scene of the mid 2000s, she was briefly (and fatuously) feted as Hollywood’s next quirky ingenue, before reshaping her trajectory by co-authoring 2012’s exuberant Brooklyn blast Frances Ha with her collaborator and partner, director Noah Baumbach. Lady Bird is her first film as sole director, a loosely autobiographical, unexpectedly tender coming-of-age piece that returns Gerwig, with a vivid sense of time and place, to her hometown. Continue reading →

There’s a wonderful moment midway through Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok, in which our hero shares a traumatic childhood memory with his brother and frequent enemy Loki: the time the latter tried to kill him by transforming into a snake. It’s rambling and absurd but also strangely poignant, with a clear rapport between the actors that’s unlike almost anything in the studio’s slickly oiled machine. Unsurprisingly, it was also improvised on set between Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston and director Taika Waititi, who spun the tale off the cuff like the fanciful father he played in his breakout film, Boy (2009).Continue reading →

The Greeks sure understand the wrath of whimsical gods. According to ancient myth, the goddess Artemis was so affronted by King Agamemnon accidentally bumping off one of her pet deer that she ordered the latter to sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, by way of appeasement (which might seem excessive, until you realise he was messing with the Mistress of Animals). Depending on which version of the story you encounter, the King either goes through with the grim deed or Artemis saves the princess by switching her for an animal at the last moment. In others, such as filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ reworking (now showing nationally), Iphigenia is heard to incant Ellie Goulding’s ‘Burn’ – the pop hit’s joyous chorus whispered in defiant mockery of Daddy’s indifference to her fate. Continue reading →

Michael Jackson was a shapeshifter, fascinated by musical and visual transformation. Of all his memorable metamorphoses — werewolf, panther, Egyptian mystic — perhaps none was as striking as that in the sequence at the centre of 1997’s Ghosts, in which Jackson’s haunted house trickster faces off against the local town Mayor out to destroy him. It’s a moment straight out of surrealist nightmare: Having taunted the corpulent bureaucrat with a series of increasingly goofy gestures, Jackson’s “Maestro” proceeds to peel his skin back over his head to reveal a demonic, chattering skull, who then holds up the lifeless visage, like some Halloween Michael Jackson death mask, with leering delight. Not quite done, the skeleton Maestro violently smashes his skull to pieces to return to — shamone! — Jackson once more. The permutations of the self are dizzying, to put it lightly, and that’s before the Maestro has bodily invaded his nemesis and forced the white man to perform a possessed dance routine. “Back to the circus, you freak!” the bewildered Mayor gasps, rattled and rhythmically disorientated. Continue reading →

At its most transformative, the camera has the capacity to shape both time and space, preserving a simulacrum of life that will eventually supplant the real with the dream. “The eye,” avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor warbles midway through a performance caught in The Silent Eye, is “the indivisible subterranean matrix.” The new work from filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson is all about that lucid eye, the spectral death dance that cinema orchestrates between the physical and the spiritual. Continue reading →

“Guys like you and Johnny Dillinger,” goes the famous line from Raoul Walsh’s exhilarating gangster classic High Sierra, “are just rushing toward death.” The words refer to Humphrey Bogart’s bandit Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, but they could just as easily be hinting at a disappearing America in the grip of change. That same year, the shocked nation would be dragged unexpectedly into a scary new world of old war, its heretofore isolationist policy ceding to the relatively unchartered territory of reluctant heroism.Continue reading →